Vincent Moon and Chryde: Filmmakers

The music video has been reinvented

At last the man who wandered in exits and the doors shut, leaving eleven people in this freight elevator — nine bandmates, plus the two men filming. Win Butler, the frontman of Arcade Fire, mutters a whispery one two three four. One member begins tapping the ceiling. Another rips pages out of a magazine, a makeshift snare. Then come the glockenspiel, the violins, the french horn — the stripped-down sounds of the song "Neon Bible." Chryde, recording the sound from below, on his knees, can feel the pieces of paper hitting his head after each rip. This is "Take Away Show" number forty-one.

In Paris, from left: Arcade Fire at the Olympia music hall; Fleet Foxes in the Grand Palais; Phoenix at the Eiffel Tower.

French filmmaking team Chryde and Vincent Moon have amassed more than one hundred of these concerts a emporter, each an intimate film of a band playing in an unexpected, often public setting. Chryde, thirty-six, is the producer, the man with the ideas and the connections. Moon, thirty-one, is the cinematographer. The films they create are less musical recordings than artistic provocations. "I often compare the 'Take Away Shows' to chemistry experiments," says Chryde. "One of the products is the music, the other product is the city. The glass you put them into is the camera — and you mix it up." Like Phoenix playing atop a double-decker tour bus en route to the Eiffel Tower, or the Kooks walking down an empty street only to end up surprised by a knot of teenage girls who crowd around, cell phones in hand, screaming and singing along.

The final videos streamed on their Web site, La Blogotheque, are neither packaged nor polished. You can hear the inconsequential muttering between songs, the hiccups, the missed chords. The acoustics can be great at times, less than great at others. But the whole way through, it sounds exactly like it would to be right there — in that elevator, the shreds of paper falling on your head.